We’re very excited to welcome Katie Bachler to Joshua Tree as our first HDTS Scout!

The HDTS Scout Residency is dedicated to learning more about the people and places that make up our diverse and ever evolving community.

Drop into the HDTS HQ, the Scout's home base, and meet Katie, our steadfast and effervescent inaugural Scout, who can be found in her base camp at the HQ making maps, hosting conversations, and baking bread – in between her off-site adventures around town and out in the field.

Katie has a lot in store during her time here, including:

a series of talks featuring local experts

joining together to create a web of knowledge

a research library and archive documenting the many spaces, places, plants, and people that make up this special region

The Feast!One of the first things that intrigues me about the desert was the talk of unusual diets and eating patterns. I was sitting in the HDTS HQ with Aurora and Andrea, and we started to talk about desert food! I was so excited by the idea of people adopting specific ways of eating out here in Joshua Tree, so I did some research and talked with local residents Angela Suchey and Jamie Poole. Jamie and her family eat according to the primal diet; they have tried many different diets and feel like this one feels the best! I learned from Jamie that the primal diet is built on the idea that we still have the same DNA as hunter-gatherers, so we should eat and act in the same way, which means eating a lot of meat and running fast and lifting heavy objects. It also means cutting out all grains from the diet, because grains came when people began to settle and introduce agriculture. Grains are planted and grow, whereas seeds and berries are found in the wild and foraged. Some primal foodists only eat raw meat, the people I talked to out here cook their meat. Angela told me about how much more energy she has now that she is on the raw food diet, and how present she feels in this special desert. I could see it in her sparkling eyes! She prepares all of her own food, another wonderful part of these diets is the connection to the process of making ones own food! The Raw food diet is based on the idea that when you cook food, you kill vital enzymes in it. We are living, we should eat live food! The raw food diet was created by a swiss medical doctor who also invented Muesli! He named his raw food clinic VITAL FORCE, a key term from the German lifestyle reform movement which states that people should pattern their lives after the logic determined by nature......You can see these diets explained in the diagram I drew.

So a group of students came from Germany and New York City, to visit for a week class exploring the idea of a Life Practice with Andrea and we cooked up a raw feast for lunch! We ate raw tacos, with a recipe from Angela; the taco meat was ground up walnuts and sun dried tomatoes! We ate raw kale salad massaged with flax seed oil, lemon juice, and hemp seeds, and drank green smoothies of celery and avocado and apples and parsley! It was so so delicious and we felt cleansed and full at the same time after eating!

This town is full of the most amazing people. Open-ness and eye contact. The desert history section of the library is extensive, with many books written by individual homesteaders and dreamers who headed here in the early to mid 1900s to "prove up" 160 acre parcels of land. Actually, this was a program of the US Gov't until 1977! All you had to do was improve the land and the 160 acres would be yours! Dreamiest!

Paper bag bush is in bloom! Lets walk through this low scrub and notice the subtle colors. The desert tortoise uses this plant as a home.